In those days, the 1970s, Canadian poets talked non-stop about place. Place was the sacred subject of poetry. The Haida poets, by contrast, never talked about place, but they lived and breathed it. Their work was immersed in the nonhuman world: the sea and the mountains, sea mammals and sea birds, beach rocks and beach weed and forest. What I needed to know in order to understand those poets was exactly what I wanted to know. It was what I needed to know in order to be where I was.

Belgian astronomer Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1874) introduced to the human sciences the idea of the average man, of the regularity and predictability of average behaviors, as opposed to individual behaviors, which are random and especially unpredictable. When human traits, such as size, become “normally” distributed, say according to a bell curve, their average supposedly represents a superior ontological reality, a whole comprised of specific properties, distinct individual cells. This idea would be the basis of future quantitative social sciences, Emile Durkheim’s Le Suicide being the prototype: sociology is not the uniting of individual psychologies.

Whether pessimistically or optimistically, it is at least interesting to note that design is again on the agenda in urban and political theory. Mouffe refers vaguely to design as a political tool for the construction of a common space, and Foster laments the lack of room for alternatives, but these could also be (mis)read as pleas for the design of a “stage for the imagination,” as Davis puts it. All of them could be considered as having in mind a kind of proto-design, producing fewer solutions (and new problems), but also social situations and processes enabling social imagination, debate, and conflict.